PHOTOGR.APHY Maximilian's S omhrero I N the introduction to his monu- mental study of the complex and paradoxical relationship of paint- ing and photography in the nineteenth century, "Art and Photography," Aaron Scharf makes this rather curi- ous observation: The initial enthusiasm for photography was largely an indication of the extent to which it confirmed the previous visual commitment of artists. Had the general character of painting by chance been SIg- nificantly different, artists could not have given to photography the same enthusiastic reception The tonal representation of nat- ural objects and natural conditions trans- mitted bv the lens was essentially similar to a style already ascendant in painting. By allowing one's imagination to dwell on some of the alternatives to nine- teenth-century realism that might "by chance" have shaped the character of European painting in the eighteen- forties- Egyptian frescoes, medieval illuminated manuscripts, primitive art -one sees the difficulty with the pas- sage. One simply cannot conceive of photography's arising in any era of art except the one in which it did arise. But until Peter Galassi, a young cura- tor in the Museum of Modern Art's photography department, mounted his recent remarkable exhibition "Before Photography: Painting and the Inven- tion of Photography" and published his remarkable accompany- ing monograph, one could not account for one's intu- itive sense of a deep, hidden connection between nine- teenth-century realism and the invention of photogra- phy in the early decades of the nineteenth century by c..... four or five different persons working independently. It is Galassi's at first weird-sounding and later-as you follow his argument-plausible and illuminating thesis that photog- raphy did not arise accidentally as a bumptious mechanical intruder on the province of art but was spawned by art itself, at a particular ripe moment, as a logical and inevitable culmination of a tendency in painting that had been set in motion by the invention of linear perspective in the fifteenth century and had reached full-blown fruition in the nineteenth century. Paintings exhibit- ing this "photographic" tendency were being done as early as the seven- teenth century, and are marked by an appearance of having been perceived, rather than conceived, by the artist- of having been "formed by the eye instead of the mind," as Galassi puts it. He contrasts one such painting- Emanuel de Witte's "Protestant Gothic Church," of 1669, an oblique, fragmentary, obstructed view of a church interior as a photographer might have been forced to take it- with "An Ideal Townscape," of 1470, by the circle of Piero della F rancesca, a regular, symmetrical, whole, frontal view of a group of buildings, which is in accurate perspective but is stil1 art being ruled by what the artist knows and wishes rather than by what he sees. The gradual and not uninter- rupted transformation of painting from a vast conceptual medium into the narrower, visual one it became in the nineteenth century is the historical framework within which Galassi places photography. As "proof" of painting's claim to be photography's precursor (or, to put it the other way around, as Galassi does, proof that "photography was not a bastard left by science on the doorstep of art, but a legitimate child of the Western picto- rial tradition"), he holds up forty- four oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings, most of which were made before 1839 (the year when Daguerre announced his discovery, convention- ally cited as the starting date of photography) and are characterized by some of the special attributes of photo- graphic imagery. The pic- tures in the exhibition are the landscape sketches ( mostly in oil) that painters made as private études for their larger, often grandiose, pub- lic works. sketches of ordinary sights in nature and of humble objects-de- tails of rural architecture, closeup studies of tree trunks, views of clumps of flowers, the particulars of gateposts, clouds, and walls. These pictures, in their blunt, inquisitive, of-the- moment, meaning-free realism, con- trast sharply with the lofty, idealized, meaning-laden historical and anecdot- al works for which they were prepara- tions. Their syntax, Galassi writes, is that of "an art devoted to the singular and contingent, rather than the universal and stable" -which, he adds, "is also the syntax of photog- raphy." Galassi's demonstration that the 91 photographic way of seeing was al- ready available to artists when photog- raphy was invented would seem to muddy the waters of Scharf's re- searches into photography's powerful influence on painting in the late nine- teenth century. In fact, however, it does just the opposite. It brings into clearer relIef than does Scharf (and Van Deren Coke, in "The Painter and the Photograph") the dual character of this influence. It enables us to see that photography was used by painters, on the one hand, as a tool of corroboration of an established way of seeing and, on the other, as an inspiration for a new way of painting. This new way-ex- emplified by Manet, Degas, and the Impressionists-took from photog- raphy its, as it were, "mistakes" and erected them into style It was where photography fell short of its manifest intention of "copying nature" -where it deviated from showing what human vision saw-that it was of maximal interest and use to the advanced painters of the eighteen-sixties, seven- ties, and eighties. Scharf traces some of the special characteristics of Impres- sionism to their sources in photo- graphic insufficiency. He links the Impressionist device of indicating pedestrians on the street by a few smudged, blurred brushstrokes (Mo- net's "Boulevard des Capucines," of 1873) with the inability of sluggish early cameras to register people on the street except as ghostly blurs. The plein-air school's new approach to the handling of light falling on or shining throug h foliage is another probable transliteration of the early camera's unearthly way of seeing-specifically, of a phenomenon called halation, which caused an ambiguous shimmer- ing brightness to appear on the print where sunlight and foliage came into contiguity. What Degas "took" from photography was, similarly, not its ca- pacity for verisrn but its tendency toward perversity. In the outrages that the camera perpetrated on the orderly world of normal seeing-the abrupt cutting off of people and objects, the confused clumpings of background figures, the bizarre foreshortenings, the awkward arrangements of limbs, the disturbing facial expressions- De- gas found the matrix for a profound painting style. In Manet's art, photog- raphy is a less insistent but no less significant presence. Scharf laboriously documents the clandestine use that Manet made of photographs for his painting "The Execution of the Em- peror Maximilian" (1867 )-photo-